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Mar 28, 2014

Salaam Cinema

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Hello Cinema (Salaam Cinema, 1995) opens with
shots of a crowd of thousands of segregated men and women, impatiently and
chaotically waiting as a small car arrives and passes through the labyrinthine,
narrow streets of north Tehran. The unsuspecting viewer would be forgiven for
mistaking the scene for footage from a political riot, especially when the ensuing
mayhem results in the entire crowd pushing through an outmuscled gate. The
beginning of Hello Cinema serves multiple purposes: exposing the extent
to which cinema enjoys popularity among Iranians of all ages, genders and
social strata; cheekily shedding light on a culture that has little respect for
social decorum; and establishing the film as a documentary, a distinction that
is mysteriously and intriguingly up for debate to this day.

Makhmalbaf’s original idea was to make a film that celebrated the 100th
anniversary of cinema, but when the casting call for 100 actors brought in
nearly 5,000 contestants to Tehran’s Ferdows Garden, the director began
to shape his film around these audition tapes. The final product is an
innovative tribute to the possibilities of the cinematic medium and an astute
evisceration of both the history and status quo of Iranian cinema. Hello
Cinema was made at a time when the national cinema of Iran was at the
height of its international popularity. Jafar Panahi was about to release The
White Balloon, his first major global success, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up
and Through the Olive Trees had just made the festival rounds, with A
Taste of Cherry on its way to Cannes, where it would win the Palme d’Or. It
was also made at a time when Makhmalbaf was beginning to shift his focus
slightly from the patently political likes of Nasuh’s Repentance and Marriage
of the Blessed to the structurally challenging, evocative brilliance of A Moment of Innocence. This was a filmmaker transitioning from being
an ideologue with a creative spirit to a provocative auteur. There would be no
ideologically motivated sounds of dogs barking, no opening a film with a call
to all angels to come to the world’s rescue (shorthand for the martyrs of the
Iran-Iraq war). This was a film about the cinema itself.

Yet, Makhmalbaf is at the forefront of his film and his engaging, complicated
but aggressive personality breathes life into a work of art that could have
otherwise been reduced to an academic experiment. Hello Cinema is a
frank discussion about the meaning of art, its place in society and the
ambitions and challenges of its practitioners. Few directors would take a
premise as narrowly straightforward as a series of audition tapes stitched
together and turn it on its head to discuss issues as varied as a nation’s
justice system, the history of domestic genre filmmaking, and socially
entrenched ideas about virginity, motherhood and women’s role in society with
equal perceptiveness and humor. Makhmalbaf had the audacity—and enjoyed, at the
time, a rare position with the Iranian censorship system—to extend his reach to
such far horizons. The resulting film is a timeless rumination on the process
of filmmaking and, paradoxically, a time capsule for the director himself, a
bewilderingly unique persona caught at his artistic peak, immediately following
the end of his religiopolitical sermons and a short while before beginning a
process of rebellious emancipation.